In The Presence Of The Enemy (15 page)

“I offered to marry you, Evelyn. You refused.”

“Don’t recount my history. I know it well enough.”

“So it can’t be that we didn’t marry. So it must be because you knew I didn’t love you in the first place. Did that offend your puritan principles? Does it still? Knowing you were my sexual peccadillo? Having slept with a man who wanted, at heart, only to fuck you? Or was the act itself not as grave an offence as the enjoyment that went with it? Your enjoyment, by the way. Mine is implicit through Charlotte’s existence.”

She felt the impulse to strike him whip through her arm. Had they not been in so public a place, she would have done so. Her palm longed for a stinging contact with his face.

“You’re despicable,” she said.

He removed his hand. “For which offence?

Touching you then? Or touching you now?”

“You don’t touch me,” she said. “You never could.”

“Self-deluding, Eve. Wasn’t that your term of choice?”

“How dare you—”

“What? Speak the truth? What we did, we did, and we both enjoyed it. Don’t rewrite history because you’d rather not face it. And don’t blame me for showing you the only good time you’ve probably had in your life.”

She pushed her coffee cup into the centre of the table. He anticipated her intention by getting to his feet. He dropped a ten-pound note next to his Perrier glass. He said, “This bloke wants the story in tomorrow’s paper. He wants it on the front page. He wants the whole story, start to finish. I’m willing to write it. I can hold up the presses till nine o’clock. If you decide to take this seriously, you know where to fi nd me.”

“The size of your ego was always the least appealing of your personal attributes, Dennis.”

“And yours was a desperate need to have the last word. But you can’t come out on top in this situation. You’d do well to realise that before it’s too late. There is, after all, another life at stake. Beyond your own.”

He turned on his heel and left her.

She found that the muscles of her neck and shoulders had locked on themselves. She kneaded her fingers against them for relief.

Everything—
everything—
she despised in men had its embodiment in Dennis Luxford, and this encounter had done nothing more than reinforce that belief. But she hadn’t clawed her way into her present position by submitting to any male’s attempt at domination. She wasn’t about to capitulate now. He could try to manipulate her with apocryphal kidnapping notes, with fictive telephone calls, with utterly specious displays of even more specious paternal concern. He could try to pluck at the cord of maternal instinct, which he so obviously believed was intrinsic to the female constitution. He could act the part of outrage, sincerity, or political perspicacity. But none of that could obviate the simple fact that
The
Source
, under six months of Dennis Luxford’s aegis, had done everything within its fi lthy power to humiliate the Government and advance the cause of the Opposition. She knew this as well as anyone with the ability to read. And for Luxford to think—simply because he had managed to involve her daughter—that now Eve Bowen would stand up in public, confess her past sins, destroy her career, and thereby allow another faggot to be placed round the stake upon which the press was intending to incinerate the Government…

Nothing on earth could possibly be more ridiculous.

And this was about his newspaper, at the bottom of it all. This was about circulation wars and political positioning and advertising revenues and editorial reputation. She had

merely become a pawn in whatever rise to or maintenance of power Dennis Luxford was orchestrating. His only mistake was in assuming she would allow herself to be moved on the chessboard to a position of his liking.

He was a swine. He had always been a swine.

Eve stood and gathered up her briefcase.

She headed for the restaurant exit. Dennis was long since gone, so she had no fear that anyone might connect her presence in Harrods to his. A pity for him, she thought. Not everything in his life was going to work out as he had it planned.

Rodney Aronson saw but did not quite believe. He’d been skulking round the racks of clothes and the displays of black headgear ever since Luxford had gone into the restaurant.

He’d missed the arrival of the woman—jockeyed from his viewing position for thirty seconds by a sweating stock boy wheeling in a rack of double-breasted black blazers with silver buttons the size of Frisbees. And while he’d tried to get a decent glimpse of her once Mr. Sweat had fussily rearranged two racks of trousers to his liking, all he’d managed to see was a slim back in a well-tailored jacket and a smooth fall of autumn-beech-leaf hair. He’d tried to see more, but he failed. He couldn’t risk attracting Luxford’s attention.

It had been one thing to watch Luxford’s body tighten at the telephone call, to watch his chair swivel round to hide his face, to be dismissed with a summary “See to the editorial on the rent boy, Rodney,” to play the waiting cat and see Luxford the mouse slip out and snag a taxi in Ludgate Circus, to follow him in a taxi of one’s own just like the detective in a low-budget film noir. That was all excusable activity, conveniently falling under the heading Keeping the Newspaper’s Interests at Heart. But this…This was dicey. The intensity of the conversation between
The Source
editor and Beech-Leaf Hair suggested more than a professional meeting which might be interpreted to
The Source
chairman as a betrayal of the newspaper’s concerns. That was what Rodney was looking for, of course. A chance to bring down Luxford and assume his own rightful place at the head of the news meeting each day. But this encounter that he was witnessing—and damn the excruciating distance he had to maintain—had all the earmarks of an amorous assignation: the heads bending towards each other, the shoulders hunching to guard breathless conversation, Luxford twisting his chair towards hers, that tender little moment of physical contact—hand-on-arm in place of hand-up-skirt. And the most indis-putable earmark of them all: arriving separately and leaving the same way. There was no doubt about it. Old Den was doing some knicker-trolling on the side.

The dipshit must be out of his mind, Rodney thought. He followed the woman at a distance and evaluated her. She had good legs and a terrific little arse and the rest of her was probably decent as well if the severe tailoring of her suit was anything to go by. But let’s not forget that unlike Rodney, who had Butterball Betsy waiting at home for his nightly ministrations, Dennis Luxford had Fiona decorating his hearth. Fabulous Fiona. Fiona of the gods.

She who had been simply dubbed the Cheeks in reference to the most famous facial bones ever to grace the cover of a fashion magazine.

With Fiona to come home to—and Rodney could only hotly imagine the state of dress, state of mind, and state of anticipation in which an ethereal enchantress like Fiona would greet her lord and master upon his return from Fleet Street each night—what in God’s name was Luxford doing playing bury the banger with anyone else?

It made no sense to Rodney why any man would cheat on a woman like Fiona, why any man would
want
to cheat on a woman like Fiona. But having a torrid little poke-and-dash on the side while married to the Cheeks
did
explain Luxford’s recent preoccupation, the questionable state of his nerves, and his mysterious disappearance last night. Not at home, according to the spectacular spouse.

Not at work, according to the newsroom nos-ies. Not in the car, according to his cellular service. At the time Rodney had accepted the suggestion that Luxford had probably slipped out for dinner. But now he knew that if any slipping had been done, Luxford had been doing it with Beech-Leaf Hair.

She looked damned familiar too, although Rodney couldn’t quite put a name to her face.

She was someone though. A high-powered lawyer or a corporate somebody.

He edged closer to her as they approached the escalators. He’d had only one look at her face as she came out of the restaurant; everything else had been the back of her head. If he could manage somehow to have a good fi fteen-second study of her, he was certain he’d be able to name her.

It was impossible, he found. Short of throwing himself in front of her on the escalator and then riding it backwards so as to face her, there was really no way. He had to make do with trailing her in the hope that something would give her away.

She rode directly to the ground floor in a mass of shoppers, most of whom, like her, were heading for the exits. They were a roiling lava flow of green shopping bags. They yammered in a dozen languages and gesticulated wildly to punctuate their words. He was reminded for the second time that day—the first time had been on the ride upwards in Luxford’s wake—why he never darkened the doorway of Harrods.

The hour caused the ground f loor to be jammed, a jostling mass of shoppers making for the doors. As Beech-Leaf Hair headed out with them, Rodney prayed that her chosen direction on the street would be towards the Knightsbridge tube station. It was true that her manner of dress suggested limos, taxis, or a car of her own. But one could still hope.

Because if she took the tube, he was on her tail. All he had to do was follow her home and her identity would be a matter of formality.

Hope was defeated, however, as he gained the street doors some ten seconds behind her.

He searched the pavement for the familiar colour of her hair, looking hopefully through the throngs heading round the corner of Basil Street towards Knightsbridge Station. He saw her among them, and at first he thought she was going to cooperatively ride the tube. But as he trotted along behind her and made the turn into Hans Crescent, he watched her stride towards a black Rover, out of which a dark-suited chauffeur was climbing. She turned in Rodney’s direction as she slid into the back seat, and again for an instant he saw her face.

He memorised that face: the straight hair framing it, the tortoiseshell specs, the full lower lip, the pointed chin. She wore power clothing, she carried a power briefcase, she had power posture, she walked with a determined, powerful gait. She wasn’t at all what he figured a bastard like Dennis Luxford would go for in a vigorous round of cheating-on-the-wife. But on the other hand, there was no doubt a primitive caveman satisfaction was to be found in wrestling a woman like that to the mattress. Rodney himself didn’t go in for the dominant types. But Luxford—a dominant type himself—would probably fi nd the challenge of thawing her first, seducing her second, and vanquishing her third a veritable aphrodisiac. So who
was
she?

He watched her car slide into the slipstream of late afternoon traffic. It rolled in his direction. As it passed him, Rodney shifted his attention from the passenger to the driver of the car itself. Which is when he saw the number plate and, more important, the plate’s last three letters. His eyes widened at the sight of them. They were part of a series, making the Rover part of a fleet of cars. And he’d hung round Westminster long enough in his past to know exactly where that fleet of cars came from. He felt his mouth curve upward happily.

He heard himself crow.

As the car swept round the corner, the vision of it remained in Rodney’s mind. As well as the interpretation of that vision.

The number plates belonged to the Government. Which meant the Rover belonged to the Government’s fleet. Which meant Beech-Leaf Hair was a member of the Government. Which meant—and at the thought Rodney could not and did not bother to contain his shout of joy—that Dennis Luxford, putative supporter of the Labour Party, editor of a Labour newspaper, was bonking the Enemy.

WHEN ST. JAMES
told Eve Bowen’s political assistant that he would wait for the MP’s return, he was favoured with a pinched-nose look of disapproval. The man said,

“Whatever you like. Sit over there, then,” but his expression implied that St. James’s presence was something akin to a noxious gas emanating from the offi ce’s central heating.

He went about his business with the air of a man intending to demonstrate how much of a burden this unscheduled visit was going to put on everyone. There was much dashing about: from phone calls to fax machines, from fi ling cabinets to an oversize calendar that hung on the wall. Watching him, St. James was reminded of the White Rabbit in
Alice
, although his physical appearance was more suggestive of a f lagpole from which was waving a bulbous banner of Guinness-coloured hair.

The young man was on his feet in an instant when Eve Bowen entered the offi ce some twenty minutes after St. James’s arrival. He crossed to the door, saying, “I was about to send out the bloodhounds on you,” and reaching for her briefcase. He scooped up a handful of telephone messages as he went on. “The committee meeting’s been put off till tomorrow. The Commons debate begins at eight tonight. The delegation from Customs wants to schedule a lunch, not a dinner. Lancaster University would like you to speak before the Conservative Feminist Association in June.
And
Mr.

Harvie is asking if you intend to give him an answer on the Salisbury question within the next decade:
Do
we really need another prison and
must
it be in his constituency?”

Eve Bowen snatched the messages from him. “I don’t think I’ve lost my ability to read in the last two hours, Joel. Isn’t there something more productive you could be doing?”

At the rebuke, an eyeblink of anger fl ashed on the assistant’s face. He said formally, “Virginia’s left for the day, Ms. Bowen. I thought it best, as this gentleman wished to wait for your return, not to leave the offi ce unoccupied.”

At this, Eve Bowen looked up from her messages and saw St. James. Without looking at Joel, she said, “Take a break for dinner. I won’t be wanting you again before eight.” To St.

James she said, “In here, please,” and led him into her offi ce.

A wooden desk faced the door, and Eve Bowen went to the credenza behind it, where she poured herself a plastic cup of water from a Thermos. She fished in her desk drawer, brought out a bottle of aspirin, shook four into her hand. Once she had taken them, she sank into the green leather chair behind the desk, removed her spectacles, and said, “Well?”